The Hydrogen Economy

The Third Industrial Revolution: Leading the Way to a Green Energy Era and a
Hydrogen Economy

Lecture Synopsis:

We are approaching the sunset of the oil era in the first half of the 21st
century. The price of oil on global markets continues to climb and peak global
oil is within sight in the coming decades. At the same time, the dramatic rise
in carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels is raising the
earth's temperature and threatening an unprecedented change in the chemistry of
the planet and global climate, with ominous consequences for the future of human
civilization and the ecosystems of the earth.

While oil, coal, and
natural gas will continue to provide a substantial portion of the world's
and the European Union's energy well into the 21st century, there
is a growing consensus that we are entering a twilight period where the full
costs of our fossil fuel addiction is beginning to act as a drag on the
world economy. During this twilight era, the 27 EU member states are making
every effort to ensure that the remaining stock of fossil fuels is used more
efficiently and are experimenting with clean energy technologies to limit
carbon dioxide emissions in the burning of conventional fuels. These
efforts fall in line with the EU mandate that the member states increase
energy efficiency 20 percent by 2020 and reduce their global warming
emissions 20 percent (based on 1990 levels), again by 2020. But, greater
efficiencies and mandated global warming gas reductions, by themselves, are
not enough to adequately address the unprecedented crisis of global warming
and global peak oil and gas production. Looking to the future, every
government will need to explore new energy paths and establish new economic
models with the goal of achieving as close to zero carbon emissions as
possible.

THE GREAT ECONOMIC REVOLUTIONS IN HISTORY: THE CONVERGENCE OF NEW ENERGY
AND COMMUNICATIONS REGIMES

The great pivotal economic changes in world history have occurred when new
energy regimes converge with new communication regimes. When that
convergence happens, society is restructured in wholly new ways. In the
early modern era, the coming together of coal powered steam technology and
the print press gave birth to the first industrial revolution. It would
have been impossible to organize the dramatic increase in the pace, speed,
flow, density, and connectivity of economic activity made possible by the
coal fired steam engine using the older codex and oral forms of
communication. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the first two
thirds of the twentieth century, first generation electrical forms of
communication—the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, electric
typewriters, calculators, etc.—converged with the introduction of oil and
the internal combustion engine, becoming the communications command and
control mechanism for organizing and marketing the second industrial
revolution.

A great communications revolution occurred
in the 1990s. Second generation electrical forms of communication—personal
computers, the internet, the World Wide Web, and wireless communication
technologies—connected the central nervous system of more than a billion
people on Earth at the speed of light. And, although the new software and
communication revolutions have begun to increase productivity in every
industry, their true potential is yet to be fully realized. That potential
lies in their convergence with renewable energy, partially stored in the
form of hydrogen, to create the first “distributed” energy regimes.

The same design principles and smart
technologies that made possible the internet, and vast distributed global
communication networks, will be used to reconfigure the world's power grids
so that people can produce renewable energy and share it peer-to-peer, just
like they now produce and share information, creating a new, decentralized
form of energy use. We need to envision a future in which millions of
individual players can collect, produce and store locally generated
renewable energy in their homes, offices, factories, and vehicles, and share
their power generation with each other across a Europe-wide intelligent
intergrid. (Hydrogen is a universal storage medium for intermittent
renewable energies; just as digital is a universal storage mechanism for
text, audio, video, data and other forms of media)

The question is often asked as to whether
renewable energy, in the long run, can provide enough power to run a
national or global economy? Just as second generation information systems
grid technologies allow businesses to connect thousands of desktop
computers, creating far more distributed computing power than even the most
powerful centralized computers that exist, millions of local producers of
renewable energy, using hydrogen storage and intelligent utility networks,
can potentially produce far more distributed power than the older
centralized forms of energy – oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear – that we
currently rely on.

The creation of a renewable energy regime,
partially stored in the form of hydrogen, and distributed via smart
intergrids, opens the door to a Third Industrial Revolution and should have
as powerful an economic multiplier effect in the 21st century as
the convergence of mass print technology with coal and steam power
technology in the 19th century, and the coming together of
electrical forms of communication with oil and the internal combustion
engine in the 20th century.

European industry has the scientific,
technological, and financial know-how to spearhead the shift to renewable
energies, a hydrogen economy, and an intelligent power grid and, by so
doing, lead the world into a new economic era. Europe's world class
automotive industry, chemical industry, engineering industry, construction
industry, software, computer and communication industries, and banking and
insurance industries, give it a leg up in the race to the Third Industrial
Revolution.

By fostering renewable energies, a
hydrogen infrastructure, and a continent-wide intelligent intergrid, the
European Union can help create a sustainable economic development plan for
its 500 million citizens in the first half of the 21st century.

The Third Industrial Revolution will require a wholesale
reconfiguration of the transport, construction, and electricity sectors,
creating new goods and services, spawning new businesses, and providing
millions of new job.

Being first to market will position the
European Union as a leader in the Third Industrial Revolution, giving it the
commercial edge in the export of green technological know-how and equipment
around the world. Producing a new generation of renewable energy
technologies, manufacturing portable and stationary fuel cells, reinventing
the automobile, transforming Europe's millions of buildings into power
plants to produce renewable energy for internal consumption or distribution
back to the grid, reconfiguring the electrical power grid as a intelligent
utility network, as well as
producing all of the accompanying technologies, goods and services that make
up a high-tech Third Industrial Revolution economy, will have an economic
multiplier effect that stretches well toward the mid decades of the 21st
century.

The coming together of distributed
communication technologies and distributed renewable energies via an open
access, intelligent power grid, represents “power to the people”. For a
younger generation that's growing up in a less hierarchical and more
networked world, the ability to produce and share their own energy, like
they produce and share their own information, in an open access intergrid,
will seem both natural and commonplace.

The key challenge that every nation needs
to address is where they want their country to be in ten years from now: In
the sunset energies and industries of the second industrial revolution or
the sunrise energies and industries of the Third Industrial Revolution. The
Third Industrial Revolution is the end-game that takes the world out of the
old carbon and uranium-based energies and into a non-polluting, sustainable
future for the human race.

Jeremy Rifkin is
president of The Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC. and
teaches at the Wharton School's Executive Education Program at the
University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Rifkin is currently advising the Prime
Minister of Slovenia, Janez Janša, during his presidency of the European
Union (January to July 2008). Mr. Rifkin also served as an adviser to
Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Jose Socrates of Portugal during
their respective European Council Presidencies, on issues related to the
economy, climate change, and energy security. He currently advises the
European Commission, the European Parliament, and several EU heads of state,
including Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain and Prime
Minister Romano Prodi of Italy. Mr. Rifkin is the author of seventeen books
on environmental, energy and economic related issues including The Hydrogen
Economy: The Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of
Power on Earth (Tarcher/Penguin).